Planetary improvement strategies
Document planetary improvement strategies here. Initial Build Order Which improvements in which order? And do you build, or buy? On the first turn I buy a factory on my home planet and purchase another colony ship (or a faster colony ship that I create in the shipyard). On every empty planet I take over I buy a Starport, then build two factories and a research lab. After that I varies based on current needs I often follow up with another research lab, an economic center, and/or an influence building. The goal is to make all of the planets consistently useful and control most of the details through the civilization manager or domestic spending sliders. --Dinny 15:53, 10 March 2006 (UTC) Bonus Tiles: Get the full effect! A tile is a tile is a tile. Any old square will do. Wait what's this colored icon? Try to take full advantage of bonus tiles by building the right improvement on the bonus square. You'll be more efficient on the planet and it may free up a tile or two. --Supreme Shogun 06:05, 17 March 2006 (UTC) Specialized Planets To specialize a planet or general mix? I often find that specialization isn't very useful unless the planet calls for it by having large specials and/or colonization events. If so I build the planet up according to the special bonuses available. Always start with 1-2 factories even for non-production worlds as you'll need them to produce the social production points to build everything else. However, on general worlds of decent size i build a little of everything- production, tech, farms, banks, culture, entertainment...the reason i feel this works better than specializing every planet is for several reasons. 1. your empire might be in serious trouble if you happen to lose a large specialized world, losing an economy world can heavy disrupt even a large empires economy, while a general world strategy, losing any given world won't hurt nearly as much. 2.Specialization on worlds is also generally wasteful of space. In smaller galaxy maps where there aren't that many planets, you need every tile. Generalized planets allow you to do this by not forcing you to build many factories/labs and still have massive production with the use of economy starbase bonuses which stack- its often faster to build 4-5 economy starbases around a cluster of planets then it is for the planet to build all the factories on the surface. You must then defend those bases but you free up a lot of planet tiles for other things. 3. Generalization also gives you strategic flexability. For example, with many decent production worlds rather than a couple super production worlds, you can more easily produce a spread of ships of various types. On average you can produce more overall ships of equal power than a player focused on only a couple worlds. Possibly even more important on large maps is the fact that it allows you to build a steady stream of troop transports. With specialized worlds, you often find you have a few large population worlds good for making transports and a majority of base worlds with low populations. The worlds most able to build will have too few people to make many trasports while the high population worlds are non-production centers, with a generalized layout, all most worlds will have a decent population and allow you to make a large number of trasports on any planet closest to the fighting giving you much greater flexibility. Specialize Everything - by fsk+ I disagree with what the poster wrote above. I find specialization to be *EXTREMELY* useful. I am playing on "gigantic" sized galaxies, but it applies to medium or better; basically on any setting where you expect to grab several decent planets. First, consider economics. A good economics planet needs 3 types of improvements: farms for population and tax base, morale boosters to keep them happy, and stock markets to boost revenue. Your high PQ planets are therefore best dedicated to economics. Now, industrial production and research production is *INDEPENDENT* of population. Therefore, you don't need any farms or entertainment improvements on planets dedicated to industry or research! Now, industry and research being independent of population is counter-intuitive, but that's how GC2's economy works. Second, consider factories. A good industrial planet needs only 1 type of improvement: factories. It also should have a starport. A medium PQ planet (10-14) makes a good industrial planet. You can't have too many of them or they'll drain your treasury. It doesn't do any good to have a super-high-PQ planet dedicated to industry; after all, you can only produce one ship per planet per turn anyway. Third, consider research. Unlike economics or industry, there is no benefit to clumping research points on the same planet. Therefore, low-PQ planets should be dedicated to research. However, your technological capital should be a high PQ planet, as you will have the capital boosting all your research centers, and your tech capital will be surrounded by economics starbases. You will have a problem that your industrial planets will be building nothing and wasting social spending. Your solution to this problem is to set your social spend rate to 0% and set "focus social" on the rest of your planets. This only wastes 1-2 bc per colony, which is clearly better than wasting 200 bc on each of your industrial colonies. Category: Strategy Category: Planetary improvements